Marvel Snap Spotlight Cache Guide

A Complete Guide to Spotlight Caches

Spotlight Caches are the most recent change to Marvel Snap’s card acquisition system. Previously, players would save up Collector’s Tokens, and purchase Series 3, 4, or 5 cards at a price of 1000, 3000, or  6000 tokens respectively.

While the Collector Token system will remain in place, Spotlight Caches will become the new main way to attain new cards.

The goal of this system is to get more cards into players hands, but for players with near complete collections, this change does make it harder to only get cards you want. However, the upside is that everyone will be getting more cards.

January Spotlight Cache Featured Cards

For those of you that already have a general idea on Spotlight Caches, here are the cards featured for the upcoming month.

• 1/2: Caiera, High Evolutionary, Hit-Monkey
• 1/9: Hercules, Werewolf by Night, Howard the Duck
• 1/16: Miek, Annihilus, Phoenix Force
• 1/23: Grandmaster, Loki, Hit-Monkey
• 1/30: Beta Ray Bill, Elsa Bloodstone, Galactus

How Spotlight Caches Work

After you pass Collection Level (CL) 500, Spotlight Caches will replace Collector’s Caches and Reserves every 120 CL. Thus, every 10 chests will become a Spotlight Cache.

Every week the Spotlight Cache will contain 4 possible rewards.

• The new card of the week
• Existing Series 4/5 Card
• Existing Series 4/5 Card
• Random Series 4/5 Card (If the random card is already owned, it will convert to 1000 Collector’s Tokens)

These rewards have an equal chance of being opened, and if you open one, the pool becomes smaller, making it more likely to receive the remaining rewards.

If you already own the featured card(s), they will be replaced with a “Spotlight Variant,” which is a time exclusive Variant for each featured card.

If you open 4 Spotlight Caches within one week, the rewards will reset to Spotlight Variants:

• Spotlight Variant (New Card of the week)
• Spotlight Variant (Featured Card 1)
• Spotlight Variant (Featured Card 2)
• Premium Mystery Variant

If you already obtained one of the Spotlight Variants in the first reward pool, the second reward pool will instead contain another Premium Mystery Variant in that slot. (More details below)

If for some reason you open 8 Spotlight Caches, the third reset will contain 4 Premium Mystery Variants.

Here is an image from Marvel Snap on how the caches work.

Spotlight Cache Pros and Cons

This new system will definitely have mixed reception, and there are pros and cons to this new system. Let’s first go over the pros.

Spotlight Cache Pros: More Cards

With the previous Collector Token system, players had a lot of control about what cards they wanted to purchase. This would lead to some weeks where the new card was expected to be bad, and thus didn’t really change anything.

The new system makes it so every week can be exciting as you can earn more cards with this new system.

Series 3 Incomplete Monthly Comparison

Series 3 Complete Monthly Comparison

As you can see by the images above, players will be getting more cards, at the cost of less Gold and Collector’s Tokens.

This also makes the experience for newer players more enjoyable, as they can look forward to more cards and possibly Spotlight Variants from their Spotlight Caches.

Collector’s Tokens will still exist, but they will be much harder to obtain, so use them wisely.

Spotlight Cache Cons: Less Control

While Spotlight Caches provides more cards for more players, it provides less control over what cards you get. If you want to guarantee getting a specific card, it could take up to 4 Spotlight Caches to open, which equates to 480 CL or 24,000 credits. (On average, it will take 2.5 tries to open a specific card, which means your credits will average out to 15,000 per card you target)

If you are unlucky, you will need to save up for a whole month to guarantee the card that you want. While you will also get three other Series 4/5 cards, you may not even want the other featured cards in the Spotlight Cache.

Even still, there are ways to mitigate your luck and try to get the most value out of your Spotlight Caches. If there is a card you absolutely want, but don’t want the other featured cards, you can consider using Collector’s Tokens instead. This way, you can save your Spotlight Caches for a week where you want maybe 2/3 of the featured cards, or even all 3.

Spotlight Variants and Premium Mystery Variants

Spotlight Variants

Spotlight Variants are new time exclusive variants for the cards featured in the Spotlight Cache. We covered how to get them above, but here’s a look at an example.

For a quick summary, here’s how to obtain the Spotlight Variants (Knull as an example).

• If you already Knull, the Spotlight Cache will instead contain the Spotlight Variant in the first reward pool.
• If you open the Spotlight Cache 4 times (and unlock Knull in the process), the reward pool will reset to Spotlight Variants for all the featured cards and 1 Premium Mystery Variant. (This method can potentially take 8 Caches to open, meaning 48,000 credits)
• You can purchase Knull in the Token Shop. This will replace Knull in the first reward pool with the Spotlight Variant.

Will Spotlight Variants ever rerun?

Second Dinner has stated that they may potentially rerun Spotlight Variants in Spotlight Caches after some point (at least 6 months, likely longer) but this is not a guarantee.

They may also release the Spotlight Variants into the Ultimate Variants that you can purchase in the Token Shop (also after a long time).

Second Dinner intends for all Spotlight Variants to “eventually become available in other ways,” but this may take a very long time.

Premium Mystery Variants

Let’s quickly talk about Premium Mystery Variants. These will occupy slots in Spotlight Caches in the second reward pool if you already obtained a Spotlight Variant.

These variants are simply another random variant, except they may contain a Super Rare Variant (the ones that cost 1200 Gold), and will not be a Pixel variant.

For most players, you won’t need to worry about Premium Mystery Variants, but you may see these if you are really gunning for a specific Spotlight Variant.

Summary

Overall, Spotlight Caches are a new system designed to get more cards into more players hands. While there are pros and cons to this new system, overall, it should bring more excitement to the game on a consistent basis, rather than simply waiting for the best cards with Tokens.

The new system will take getting used to, but if you plan accordingly, you should be mostly satisfied with the new system anyway.

If you’re a casual player or light spender, you will be excited to get more cards. If you’re a whale or content creator, know that it will take more resources to get the new card every week. (But at least you’ll get cool new Spotlight Variants at the same time)

If you want more information on the Spotlight Cache system, you can take a look at Marvel Snap’s Official Release Notes.

We’ll be updating the top of this page with the featured Spotlight Caches every month, so be sure to check back to get the latest news on Spotlight Caches.